Paper Dreamer
by Chocomint3
Summary: Beginnings are the most intriguing, aren't they? Half-a-thousand words dedicated to one moment, one life, one existence, one meeting. Vignette.


**Title:** Paper Dreamer

**Summary:** Beginnings are the most intriguing, aren't they? Half-a-thousand words dedicated to one moment, one life, one existence, one meeting. Vignette.

**Notes:** This is a short one-shot kind of thing that I tried to continue somehow but couldn't, so I (sort of) stopped trying to. Haha. I tried out a different style of writing for this one (experimenting for the win) and I like how it came out, so I'm going to try to replicate it sometime again.

Please enjoy!

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_~Paper Dreamer_

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The boy bolts upright and scrambles for the pile of papers on his nightstand. Squinting through the dim light and ignoring the autumn cold swirling around him, he locates the lowest line of ants sprawled across the page and begins to write. His pen flies across the page, leaving messy tails of ink as he desperately clings to the vestiges of his dream.

The cold pre-dawn light sweeps over her vision and washes out the colors of the world with blackish blues and purples. Tendrils of sparks rush up her legs as her feet brush through icy blades of grass. She smiles. She's stumbled upon a rare gem today.

The boy's room is awash with the slow, colorless gloom of sunrise; the approach of day has begun to chase away the cold hues of night. He grits his teeth and sets down his pen, mid-sentence. His dream has escaped him, and he is left with only footprints in the sand. Even those, he knows, will wash away, when the coming day's worries and events push them from his mind. The boy glances at the steady neon yellow numbers on his clock. He lets out a breath of air as the numbers confirm his suspicion: it is half past six, and he must begin preparing for the day ahead.

She places a slender hand on the tree's trunk, watching as the boy appears at the doorway, book bag slung over one shoulder and a pen behind his ear. When he disappears down the road, she wanders over to his bedroom window and pulls it open, slipping inside.

She reaches down into his desk drawers, casts an eye over the world underneath his bed, runs her hands through the contents of his closet. She flips through hundreds and hundreds of thin slices of 'proof of the boy's existence': half-finished and scribbled out sketches of unsung sounds, old tests with fading pencil and glaring red marks, essays and stories with black typeset haloed by neons, paint-splattered papers warped with water, notebooks colored with ink and yellowing with age.

She picks up the last item, the one she's been avoiding the whole morning, and brushes her fingertips over the smooth yet coarse leather and the embroidered words on the cover. His journal, his diary. The one item she will not read. She sets it down carefully onto the smooth wood of his desk and perches on his bed. Readjusting the dash of pale yellow around her waist, she waits.

When he returns, the house is—as usual—almost uncomfortably silent. Today is one of those days on which he wishes he could sink into the din of the boisterous crowds on the bus and at school, but he takes off his shoes quietly and calls a soft, "I'm home."

She fixes a placid smile on her face and stops up the bubbling anticipation in her chest. When he turns and enters his room, she greets him with a cordial monotony.

"Welcome back."

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_Word Count: 498 words._

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For this one, I wanted to create a calm kind of atmosphere, one that captures the serenity of daybreak and the fluidity of everyday life... to put it somewhat poetically. ;) I also wanted to get across the boy and the girl's personalities through things that aren't dialogue.

**Request**: If it isn't too much trouble, please comment on the overall feeling this gave you and what you felt were the characters' personalities. ^_^ Speculation would also be of help, because as much as I wished to continue this, I couldn't figure out what was going on, haha.

Thank you very much for reading! Please talk to me! I don't bite!


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